A Good Year (PG-13)

Max Skinner (Russell Crowe) may be out a job, but all is not lost for our haute-bourgeois hero! A letter, lately delivered from a notary in Provence, bears news of an inheritance from his departed uncle Henry: the shabby-chic chateau where Max summered as a lad, vineyard, caretakers, and clichés included. Such is the setup of Peter Mayle's novel A Good Year, the perfect diversion for misogynistic investment bankers whose personal assistants neglected to pack the new issue of Vanity Fair in their Vuitton weekenders. Soon to be ignored at a multiplex near you, the film version arrives courtesy of screenwriter Marc Klein and that unsurpassed master of the effervescent romantic comedy, Sir Ridley Scott. And so pretty people do lovely things in picturesque locales rendered weirdly oppressive by the filmmaker, as Max struggles to enjoy the simple life. Scott can do mayhem, dystopia, and the rampaging alien (extraterrestrial, android, Somali, Demi Moore) with the best of them, but the breezy touch is not his forte.